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Meet the Author at Cardiff BookTalk: Merve Emre, 3 June 2019

Do you know your personality type? Have you put yourself to the test through an online personality quiz such as the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator? If you have, you’re one of millions of people around the world who’ve sought to categorise and quantify their personalities. But how did the personality test come about? And what does this cultural phenomenon tell us about how we define ourselves?

Cardiff BookTalk is pleased to invite you to a very special event to close our 2018-2019 programme. Turning for the first time to a non-fiction book, we’re thrilled to welcome guest author Dr Merve Emre to give a talk connected to What’s Your Type?.

Merve Emre is Associate Professor of English at Oxford University. She’s the author of two books and her essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, The Nation, and a host of other publications. Her most recent book, What’s Your Type?, draws from original reporting and never-before-published documents to give us an unprecedented history of the personality test conceived a century ago by a mother-daughter team—fiction writers with no formal training in psychology—and how it insinuated itself into our lives.

According to The New York Times, What’s Your Type? “begins like a true-crime thriller, with the tantalising suggestion that a number of unsettling revelations are in store. Inventive and beguiling…the revelations [Emre] uncovers are affecting and occasionally (and delightfully) bizarre. This is history that reads like biography that reads like a novel – a fluid narrative that defies expectations and plays against type”.

Dr Emre will be with us in person to unpack how personality tests help us to think through a timeless question: What makes you you? She’ll also answer readers’ questions and be available to sign copies of her book.

So please join us on Monday 3rd June! The main event will be preceded by a reception with tea, coffee, and biscuits at 6.30pm in Cardiff University’s School of Optometry and Vision Sciences, Maindy Road, Cardiff. To make the most of the session, you may like to read or reread What’s Your Type?—and check out some of the interviews Dr Emre has conducted about the book, which will be shared via the Cardiff BookTalk blog over the coming weeks.